Watergate may be the
most famous story in American investigative journalism history. It led
to impeachment hearings, President Nixons resignation from office,
and a spate of new political ethics laws. It also had an enormous impact
on the practice of investigative journalism. Woodward and Bernstein wrote
two best-selling books (one of which is quoted at length in this case)
on the case and a popular movie, starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman,
was made of it. Enrollments in journalism schools skyrocketed.

For journalists, a
key question is this: why did one newspaper, The Washington Post, succeed
in keeping the story alive while just about everyone else gave up? The
answer to that question reveals a great deal about why some newspapers
succeed and why others fail, why some reporters bring to a story the skills
and perseverance that others seem to lack. The lessons of Watergate remain
just as instructive today as they did 25 years ago.

Readers of The Washington
Post awoke on Sunday morning, June 18, 1972, to discover this story by
veteran police reporter Alfred E. Lewis on the front page.

Five men, one
of whom said he is a former employee of the Central Intelligence
Agency, were arrested at 2:30 a.m. yesterday in what authorities
described as an elaborate plot to bug the offices of the Democratic
National Committee here.

The five men, said
the story, "were surprised at gunpoint by three plain-clothes officers
of the metropolitan police department in a sixth floor office at the plush
Watergate, 2600 Virginia Ave., NW, where the Democratic National Committee
occupies the entire floor."

Watergate.

The name still reverberates
as one of the greatest domestic scandals in American political history,
leading to the resignation of the President, Richard Nixon, and the trial
and conviction of many of the men closest to him. It echoes, too, as the
most daring and exciting story in the history of American journalism.

Barry Sussman, the
Post's city editor in 1972, says in an interview that he never thought
of the story in cosmic terms; he just thought it was a good yarn that
needed good reporting. He remembers that about 8:30 a.m. on Saturday,
June 17, he received a phone call from his boss, Harry M. Rosenfeld, the
metropolitan editor. Rosenfeld said five men had been arrested for a break-in
at Democratic Party headquarters and asked him to get into the office
on what was normally his day off to supervise the coverage. Before doing
anything elsebefore even getting out of bedSussman called
two reporters to get on the story. One was predictableAl Lewis,
the Post's legendary police reporter, a man who had been on the beat so
long (36 years) he thought like a cop. Lewis arrived at the Watergate
complex with the city's acting police chief. They walked through the police
lines and into the building, passing dozens of frustrated and curious
reporters, and went straight up the elevator to the party headquarters.
The other reporter summoned by Sussman wasn't so predictable. His name
was Bob Woodward. He had worked for the Post on the metropolitan (local)
staff for eight months.

With more than 80
metropolitan reporters at his beck and call, why did Sussman pick Woodward?

"You could see
he was good," Sussman recalls. "Though hed only been at
the Post a short time, hed been on Page One as much as anyone else."
That was partly because he never seemed to leave the building. "I
worked the police beat all night," Woodward says, "and then
Id go home  I had an apartment fiver blocks from the Post
 and sleep for a while. Id show up in the newsroom around
10 or 11 [in the morning] and work all day too. People complained I was
working too hard."

He says he just couldnt
help himself. "I loved the place. I loved the feel of the news room
 the intensity, the mystery, the unexpected things that happened."

"He really had
his shit together," recalls Ben Bradlee, the Posts executive
editor at the time of the break-in, in an interview. "He was tenacious
and worked hard," says metro editor Rosenfeld. "He had already
impressed me by the work he did on the George Wallace shooting."
Wallace, a presidential candidate, was shot an seriously wounded May 15
at a suburban shopping mall in Laurel, Md. At the time, according to Sussman
and Rosenfeld, Woodward said he had "a friend" who might be
able to help. Woodward, interviewed in his beautiful home in Georgetown,
the capitals poshest neighborhood, says that even after all these
years he wont say anything more. The "friend," of course,
was the most mysterious of all Watergate figures, Woodwards oracle,
the man we all know as "Deep Throat."

Woodward was dispatched
that first day to cover the court arraignment of the five burglars. He
squeezed into a front-row seat and heard James W. McCord, one of the defendants,
describe himself as a retired government worker. What agency? he was asked.
"The CIA," McCord replied in what was almost a whisper. "Holy shit," Woodward
remembers saying to himself, half-aloud.

Wandering around
the newsroom that Saturday was the Post's Peck's Bad Boy, the official
office hippie, a long-haired reporter who played the guitar and never
turned his expense accounts in on time: Carl Bernstein, another young
Metro reporter.

Bernstein had been
at the Post since the fall of 1966. In 1972, Katharine Graham, publisher
of the Post, wrote in her splendid autobiography, Personal History,
that Bernstein "had not distinguished himself. He was a good
writer, but his poor work habits were well known throughout the city room
even then, as was his famous roving eye. In fact, one thing that
stood in the way of Carls being put on the story was that Ben Bradlee
was about to fire him. Carl was notorious for an irresponsible expense
account and numerous other delinquencies  including having rented
a car and abandoned it in a parking lot, presenting the company with an
enormous bill."

But Sussman liked
Bernstein. He got the job.

Woodward was a wealthy
young man from the Midwest who went to private schools and Yale University.
He had served five years as an officer and a gentleman in the U.S. Navy.
Bernstein was a rare species in the Post newsroom  a native of Washington.
He had grown up in metropolitan Washington and spent some time at the
University of Maryland before dropping out. Both reporters had been married,
but Woodward was divorced and Bernstein was separated from his wife. Without
family obligations, they were able to devote almost all of their waking
hours to the story.

So, by late afternoon
that first day, the Posts Watergate team was already shaping up.
First of all, Woodward, 30 at the time of the burglary, and Bernstein,
29, the reporters. Next up the ladder, Sussman, 38, the city editor (responsible
for District of Columbia news), an introspective fellow who grew up in
Brooklyn and had been something of a vagabond before settling in at the
Post. Sussmans boss was Rosenfeld, 43, who had been foreign editor
at the New York Herald Tribune when it folded. He was the Posts
metropolitan editor (in charge of the news from the city and its suburbs).
Day by day, these were the people who worked on the Watergate story, all
the time.

They all reported
to Howard Simons, 43, a one-time science editor chosen by Bradlee to run
the paper day to day. He was the Posts highly competent managing
editor. Simons, in turn, reported to Bradlee, 51 years old in June of
1972. That Saturday, when the story broke, he was at his cabin in West
Virginia, where the phone, as usual, wasnt working. And at the very
top was Katharine Graham, the papers gutsy publisher.

Sunday's story
in the Post described the break-in and said one of the defendants was
James McCord, a retired CIA agent. Monday's storyit was bylined
Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, their first of many byline pairingssaid
McCord was not only a retired CIA agent, he was also "the salaried security
coordinator for President Nixon's re-election committee." And that wasn't
all, the two reporters saidhe also was under contract to provide
security services to the Republican National Committee.

The reporters
were able to pin down McCord's campaign connections because the paper's
regular White House reporter, Carroll Kilpatrick, had spotted McCord's
name in Sunday's story. "I know that man," he said, and he called the
news desk to say McCord was on the re-election committee's payroll.

In the first of the
many lies that were to follow, former Attorney General John Mitchell,
head of the Committee for the Re-election of the President, which came
to be known as "CREEP" by reporters, said that McCord's only
role with the campaign was to install a security system at campaign headquarters.
As for the other four defendants (all of them residents of Miami with
anti-Fidel Castro backgrounds), Mitchell said they "were not operating
either in our behalf or with our consent."

Rosenfeld recalled
that by late Sunday afternoon Bernstein had concluded that Nixon and his
long-time hatchet-man, Murray Chotiner, were behind Watergate.
(This time, though, Chotiner, who had performed any number of questionable
chores for Nixon over the years, was purely innocent.) Bernstein wrote
a five-page memo expounding his "Chotiner Theory," and sent it to Woodward,
Sussman, and Rosenfeld. "It scared the marrow out of my bones," Rosenfeld
remembers. For many reporters and editors at the Post, and for almost
everyone else at other media outlets, the idea that the President could
be involved in these insane activities was simply ludicrous.

Sussman says
he didn't want to think about any of those things. He simply wanted to
keep the story going day by day, and see where it finally ended. Tuesday's
story, though, kept the ball rolling nicely, and in the direction of 1600
Pennsylvania Avenue.

The break came
from the Post's night police reporter, Eugene Bachinski. On Monday, a
friendly police officer allowed him to browse through the notebooks and
papers confiscated from the five suspects. In one address book, he found
the notation, "W.H." In another, he found the listing, "W. House." The
name connected to both of them was that of Howard Hunt. Bachinski arrived
at the newsroom shortly before noon on Monday, and told Sussman what he
had discovered.

Sussman gave
Hunt's name to Woodward (in the book he wrote with Bernstein, All the
President's Men, Woodward says he already knew about Hunt because
Bachinski had called him at home late Sunday night). Woodward called the
White House switchboard and the telephone operator put him through to
an extension, but there was no answer. J ust as Woodward was about to
hang up, the operator came back on the line and told him, "There is one
other place he might be. In Mr. Colson's office." Hunt wasn't there either,
but the secretary answering the phone suggested he might be reached at
Robert R. Mullen and Company, a public-relations firm. She said he worked
there as a writer.

Everybody on
the Post's national staff knew who Colson was. He was Charles W. Colson,
special counsel to the President of the United States, and he was a major
figure in the White House. But Woodward had no idea. He asked an editor
on the news desk if he had heard of someone named Colson. Sure, the editor
said, Chuck Colson, like Murray Chotiner, was one of Nixons "hatchet"
men. Woodward called the White House back and confirmed that Hunt was
on the payroll as a consultant working for Colson.

Armed with all
this information, he called Hunt at his P.R. firm. "Howard Hunt here,"
the man answering the phone said. Woodward identified himself and then
asked why Hunt's name and phone number were in the address books of two
of the burglars arrested at the Watergate.

"Good God," Hunt
said, Woodward and Bernstein recalled in their book, All the President's
Men. Hunt paused for a moment before going on. "In view that the matter
is under adjudication, I have no comment." Woodward said Hunt then slammed
the phone down.

In the book,
Woodward said he telephoned his special "friend" who worked for the governmentthe
legendary anonymous source dubbed "Deep Throat"and was reassured
that the FBI considered Hunt a prime suspect in its Watergate investigation.
Woodward and Bernstein also said in their book that Sussman, invariably
referred to as a master of detail, remembered Colson, and pulled out clips
about him in the Post library. Sussman still sizzles at the idea that
he was not much more than a master of detail. He argues that he was the
editor with the broadest overview of the whole story and that, time and
time again, he was the editor who whipped these stories into shape, often
rewriting the leads. Sussman says in an interview he has no recollection
of pulling those clips from the library.

In any event,
someone pulled the Colson clips because the information in them became
part of the story. One of the stories in the clips was written by a Post
reporter, Kenneth W. Clawson. Clawson had left the paper earlier in 1972
to become the White House deputy director of communications. He had quoted
an anonymous source describing Colson as "one of the original back room
boys. The guys who fix things when they broke down and do the dirty work
when it's necessary." Somebody slipped that lovely quote into the story,
taking careful note to mention that Clawson was now working at the White
House. Tuesday's story was headlined, "White House Consultant Linked to
Bugging Suspects."

"Three days into
the story," said Ben Bradlee, "and we're already into the White House.
Not bad for those two kids."

The fact that four
of the Watergate burglars were anti-Castro partisans from Miami led some
reporters and investigators to the conclusion that Cuba had something
to do with the break-in. At the New York Times, reporter Walter Rugaber
had been sent to Miami and was writing some interesting stories about
how the Watergate burglars had been financed. Rugaber's contact seemed
to be Dade County state's attorney, or prosecutor, Richard Gerstein, who
was running for re-election and had opened his own Watergate investigation.

At this point, the
Post, in fact, went into something of a funk. The problem was the paper's
massive commitment to the coverage of the Presidential election. More
than 40 reporters were preparing to cover the summer's political conventions
and there wasn't a whole lot of time for very much else. In his book,
The Great Cover-Up; Nixon and the Scandal of Watergate, Sussman
said that, to the paper's political writers, the Watergate story was "like
a leaky faucetsomething to think about when you stood near the sink,
easy to forget when you were out covering the election campaign."

Things were so slow
that Sussman took his wife and two daughters to the beach for a holiday
starting the last day in June. He was there on Saturday, July 1, when
Mitchell announced he was stepping down as the President's campaign manager
to be with his family. He was succeeded by former Minnesota Congressman
Clark MacGregor. When he returned from vacation, Sussman was called into
managing editor Simons office and told the paper had to do more
with the Watergate story. Simons pointed to the New York Times on his
desk, carrying one of Rugaber's reports. Other papers were getting into
the act too. On July 22, the Long Island daily Newsday reported that a
former White House aide named G. Gordon Liddy had been fired in June for
refusing to cooperate with the FBI. Simons told Sussman to work full time
on the story, along with Woodward and Bernstein.

The Dahlberg Link

Bernstein tried to
play catchup with the Times' reporting, a job loathed by every good reporter.
He learned from reading the Times and by making his own phone calls that
the Miami investigators had subpoenaed bank records of one of the burglars,
Bernard L. Barker, and had begun turning up provocative information. From
reading the Times, Bernstein learned that $89,000 had been deposited in
Barker's account and then withdrawn from it in April. He reached the Dade
County prosecutor's chief investigator, Martin Dardis, and asked him about
the $89,000. "It's a little more than $89,000," Dardis said. It was, in
fact, a little more than $100,000 and most of the money had been "laundered"
in Mexico, so no one could trace its origins.

Bernstein was given
permission to fly to Miami to learn more about the cash. As he boarded
the plane on Monday, July 31, he glanced for the first time at the front
page of the New York Times. "Cash in Capital Raid Traced to Mexico," the
headline said. "Bernstein directed his ugliest thoughts to Gerstein and
Dardis," he and Woodward wrote in their book. Upon arriving in Miami,
Bernstein checked in at the Sheraton Four Ambassadors, the city's poshest
hotel. He asked about Rugaber's whereabouts. "He checked out over the
weekend," the desk clerk told him.

About 8 p.m. Monday,
Bernstein called from Miami to say that after a long game of cat and mouse,
Dardis  unable to shake the persistent reporter -- had finally let
him see the actual checks. "There's a check for $25,000 signed by
someone named Kenneth Dahlberg," Bernstein said. He had no idea who Dahlberg
was, and neither did Woodward or Sussman.

In their book, the
two reporters recount that Bernstein started working the phones furiously,
calling police investigators and bank officials in Florida. One of the
bankers, James Collins, said yes, he knew Dahlberg  he was one of
the banks directors  and added, ever so gratuitously, that
Dahlberg had been head of Nixons Midwest campaign in 1968. The two
reporters wrote in their book that Bernstein called Sussman with his scoop
and that Sussman told him that Woodward was at that moment on the phone
with Dahlberg. "For Christ's sake!" Bernstein screamed, "tell him Dahlberg
was head of Nixon's Midwest campaign in 1968." "I think he knows something
about it," Sussman is reported to have replied, according to the
Woodward-Bernstein book.

Woodward, working
on the story in the Post newsroom in Washington, had traced a Kenneth
H. Dahlberg to two addresses, one in Boca Raton, in Florida, the other
in Minneapolis. Woodward tracked his man down to the home in Minneapolis.
They chatted for a few minutes. Yes, said Dahlberg, he also had a home
in Boca Raton. And what did he do? Well, among other things, he said,
he was a fund-raiser for Richard Nixon.

Dahlberg called back
later to confirm that Woodward really was a Post reporter. And he spilled
more of the beans. He had raised so much money in cash, he said, that
he had become worried about carrying it around. So he deposited the money
in the First Bank and Trust, in Boca Raton, in exchange for a cashier's
check. When he got to Washington, he gave the cashier's check either to
Hugh Sloan, treasurer of the campaign finance committee, or to the top
man himself, Maurice Stans, the former Secretary of Commerce and head
of the finance committee. He told Woodward he had already talked to the
FBI three times and had no idea how the money ended up in Barker's bank
account. Or, he might have added, how fifty-three $100 bills drawn from
Barker's account had ended up in the pockets of the Watergate burglars.

The story ran in
the Post on Tuesday, August 1, on the lower half of the front page. It
would have received more prominence that day if it weren't for the fact
that another story led the page with an eight-column banner: "Eagleton
Bows Out of '72 Race; McGovern Weighs Replacement." Thomas Eagleton, a
well-respected U.S. Senator from Missouri, had withdrawn as McGovern's
vice presidential running mate when it became public knowledge that he
had been hospitalized three times with mental problems and had undergone
shock therapy on two of those occasions.

The Post's August
1 Watergate story began with these words:

A $25,000 cashier's
check, apparently earmarked for President Nixon's re-election campaign,
was deposited in April in a bank account of one of the five men
arrested in the break-in at Democratic National Headquarters here
June 17.

The check was
made out by a Florida bank to Kenneth H. Dahlberg, the Presidents
campaign finance chairman for the Midwest. Dahlberg said last night
that in early April he turned the check over to "the treasurer
of the Committee (for the Re-election of the President) or to Maurice
Stans himself."

Woodward remembers
that when Sussman finished editing the storyright on deadline, as
usualhe put his pencil and his pipe down on his desk and told his
ace reporter, "We've never had a story like this. Just never."

That night, Woodward
says, he had dinner with the man he considers a mentor, the late Jerry
Landauer, the Wall Street Journal's legendary investigative reporter (who
broke the story that led to the resignation of Nixon's vice president,
Spiro Agnew). "Bob," Landauer said, "I would have given my left arm for
that Dahlberg story today."

Looking back at all
the Post's Watergate stories, Sussman says this one, the August 1 story,
was the most significant because it showed more clearly than anything
else that the Watergate burglars were a part of Nixon's re-election campaign.
It gave the lie to the campaign's contention that the Watergate break-in
was carried out by zealots operating independentlyGordon Liddy,
chief among themwho were simply out of control. It set in motion
the official inquiries that led to Nixon's resignation.

All these years later,
Ben Bradlee still revels in the Post's Watergate coverage, and especially
that August 1 story. "We had street reporters," he says. "Over at the
New York Times, they had Max Frankel [the Washington bureau chief] and
he spent most of the day talking on the phone with Henry Kissinger."

Luck had been a part
of nailing down the Dahlberg story. Rugaber missed the check; Bernstein
found it. But that wonderful Post passionthe sheer doggedness of
the coverageplayed a part too. Bernstein had been pushed around
in Miami. He met delay after delay. Maybe he could see the checks, maybe
not. But he persisted. He didn't give up, he didn't call the office back
in Washington and say he was coming home because the authorities weren't
cooperating. In the end, he got the single biggest, most important of
all the Watergate stories. It was at this point that the Times and the
rest of the Post's opposition began to fade away. It was the beginning
of the Post's ascension.

It is difficult to
exaggerate just how hard Bernstein and Woodward worked on the Watergate
story. They made phone calls; they knocked on doors. They each developed
a thick list of sources, and there wasnt much overlap between one
list and the other. They worked all the time -- and they believed in what
they were doing.

*
* *

Suspicions were now
growing that prosecutor Earl Silbert and the Justice Department, heavily
influenced by the Nixon White House, hoped to restrict the investigation
solely to the burglars.. The August 1 story about the $25,000 Dahlberg
check demonstrated that it was a much bigger story than that. The wheels
began to turn.

The most important
wheel was a little-known agency in the General Accounting Office called
the Federal Elections Division, headed by Philip S. "Sam" Hughes, a veteran
bureaucrat who had helped write the GI Bill of Rights following World
War II. The agency had set up shop on April 7, charged by a recently enacted
campaign-reform act to tighten up the reporting of campaign contributions.
Best of all, it was a part of the legislativenot the executivebranch.
Hughes told Woodward there was no mention of the Dahlberg check in any
of the finance filings by the Nixon committee. He pledged he would take
a serious looka full auditto see what was going on.

At the same time,
Congressman Wright Patman, the 79-year-old chairman of the House Banking
and Currency Committee, directed his staff to see if there had been any
violations of banking law in the way the Dahlberg check and the laundered
Mexican cash had been handled. That investigation never really got off
the ground, partly because Patman some days couldn't assemble a quorum
of committee members, but it was a start. On the Senate side, Edward M.
Kennedy, chairman of the Judiciary Committee's subcommittee on Administrative
Practices and Procedure, began another investigation.

But it was Sam Hughes
and his little agency that caused the most trouble for the White House.
Woodward's editors told him to make absolutely certain that no other paper
beat the Post on the agency's findings. Woodward called someone at Sam
Hughes' office every day.

On August 22, the
second day of the GOP national convention in Miami, Woodward and Bernstein
reported that Hughes' election office was preparing to release its report
documenting illegal activities by Nixon's re-election committee. Hours
before the final report was to be released, however, Hughes was summoned
to Miami by Maurice Stans, for whom he had once worked, to talk things
over. He made the flight, even though he knew it might look improper if
the press got hold of it. Word did leak outit almost always does
in situations like thisand Democratic National Chairman Lawrence
O'Brien charged that it was "the most outrageous conspiracy of suppression
that I have witnessed in a generation of political activity."

The Nixon campaign
knew it couldn't suppress Hughes' report, which was published August 26,
after the convention adjourned, but it had managed to keep it from coming
out while Nixon was celebrating his triumphal renomination.

In the short time
he was in Miami, Hughes managed to track down Hugh Sloan, the one-time
Nixon finance committee treasurer. It was at that time, Woodward and Bernstein
say, that Sloan revealed to Hughes that the Dahlberg check and the Mexican
money were a part of a larger cash fund kept in two safes at CREEP headquartersone
in Sloan's old office and one in Stans's office. This was the secret campaign
fundthe slush fundthat the P.R. officials at the White House
and at campaign headquarters had insisted didn't exist.

Senator Bob Dole,
the Republican national chairman and a major White House mouthpiece, said
George McGovern's Democratic finance committee had committed a lot more
serious violations of campaign-finance lawshe cited 14 of themand
demanded that Hughes investigate the Democrats too. The Post published
this story on September 13, reporting that the "General Accounting
Office investigators have found only technical violations of the new campaign
finance law ... [by] George McGoverns election committee, according
to reliable sources."

The findings contrast
sharply with those from Hughes inquiry into the Nixon re-election
committee, after which the GAO referred its audit to the Justice Department
for criminal investigation. But, of course, the Justice Department was
moving at a glacial pace in its Watergate investigation, saying frequently
that it would be a disservice to the system and to the defendants to comment
on the various allegations.

Sussman says he often
wondered why the Post had so little media competition in the Watergate
story. No other paper, he says, took the time to investigate Dole's allegations
of impropriety in the financial affairs of the McGovern campaign. There
was even a little skepticism at the Post, especially among members of
the national staff, he says. "Be careful, they kept telling us, don't
go overboard. These things happen in all campaigns."

Metropolitan Editor
Rosenfeld says it didn't bother him a bit. "I was happy to be alone on
the story," he recalled in a long telephone interview for this case study.
"We all know what happens when one paper gets ahead of everybody else.
The other guys gang up and piss on your story. Journalists are always
denigrating one another."

By mid-August, Woodward,
Bernstein, Simons, Sussman and others directly connected to the Watergate
story were convinced that senior officials at the White Houseperhaps
even the Presidenthad to be involved,. Checks for $25,000 didn't
move around by themselves; somebody with influence had to authorize them.
One of the obstacles in pinning the story down was the campaign headquarters
itself. It was like a bunker, with uniformed guards at the door. Interviews
with the people inside were hard to set up and when a reporter was allowed
past the gates he was accompanied by someone to the office of the person
he or she had arranged to interview, and then taken in hand and led back
to the gate and out the front door when he or she was finished.

Who were all those
people working at CREEP headquarters? What were their telephone numbers
and where did they live? Woodward and Bernstein wrote that a Washington
Post researcher obtained a list of 100 CREEP employees from a friend.
Another list, containing even more names, was published by Sam Hughes's
agency at the GAO.

"Studying the roster
became a devotional exercise not unlike reading tea leaves," Bernstein
and Woodward wrote in their book. "Divining names from the list, Bernstein
and Woodward, in mid-August, began visiting CRP people at their homes
in the evenings," they wrote, using the third person. "The first-edition
deadline was 7:45 p.m., and each night they would set out soon afterward,
sometimes separately, sometimes together in Woodward's 1970 Karmann Ghia.
When traveling alone, Bernstein used a company car or rode his bicycle."

They hadnt
known each other very well when they began working on the story. And,
in the early days, they viewed each other with a little bit of suspicion.
By now, though, they were a team. This is how they described their working
relationship in their book:

They realized
the advantages of working together, particularly because their temperaments
were so dissimilar.... Each kept a master list of telephone numbers.
The numbers were called at least twice a week. Eventually, the combined
total of names on their lists swelled to several hundred, yet fewer
than 50 were duplicated....

By this time,
Bernstein and Woodward had developed their own style of working together.
To those who sat nearby in the newsroom, it was obvious that Woodward-Bernstein
was not always a smoothly operating piece of journalistic machinery. The
twofought, often openly. Sometimes they battled for fifteen minutes
over a single word or sentence. Nuances were critically important; the
emphasis had to be just right. The search for the journalistic mean was
frequently conducted at full volume, and it was not uncommon to see one
stalk away from the other's desk. Sooner or later, however (usually later),
the story was hammered out.

Each developed
his own filing system; oddly, it was Bernstein, far the least organized
of the two, who kept records neatly arranged in manila folders labeled
with the names of virtually everyone they encountered. Subject files were
kept as well. Woodward's record-keeping was more informal, but they both
adhered to one inviolate rule: they threw nothing out and kept all their
notes, and the early drafts of stories. Soon they had filled four filing
cabinets.

Usually, Woodward,
the faster writer, would do a first draft, then Bernstein would rewrite.
Often, Bernstein would have time to rewrite only the first half of the
story, leaving Woodward's second half hanging like a shirttail. The process
often consumed most of the night.

Sussman says the prodecure
did not always work exactly as the two reporters describe it. Often, he
recalls, there was heavy editing and rewriting. "These two guys were
good leg men," he says, "but they werent much better than
okay in putting their thoughts together."

The door-to-door canvassing
began paying off, in bits and pieces. "It was all part of a mosaic," Woodward
explains. One CREEP employee told the reporters, in tears, that she was
scared of what was happening, and that all kinds of documents were being
shredded. Another said that Frederic LaRue, Herbert L. Porter, and Jeb
Stuart Magruder, all former White House employees working at campaign
headquarters, knew about the bugging of the Democratic headquarters. What
amazed them both was the fact that many of these people hadn't been interviewed
by Federal investigators. Woodward remembers Earl Silbert, the chief prosecutor,
asking him, "Why are you believing all these women?" which even at the
time he remembers as being a sexist remark.

Deep Throat

Lurking in the background
was Woodward's special friend, the man whom managing editor Simons had
christened "Deep Throat " (the title of a pornographic movie popular at
the time). In their book, Woodward and Bernstein described Deep Throat
as a member of the Executive Branch who had access to information at both
CREEP and the White House. Woodward reported later that "Deep Throat"
had agreed to talk to Woodward on "deep background" with a guarantee that
neither his name nor his title would ever be revealed without his permission.

At first, "Deep Throat"
and Woodward talked on the telephone. But, as the story became hotter,
"Deep Throat" insisted on other arrangements. He suggested that Woodward
open the drapes in his apartment at 17th and P streets as a signal. "Deep
Throat" would check the drapes every day. If they were open, they would
meet that night. There was one problem with the arrangementWoodward
liked to open the drapes to let the sun in. So they refined the procedure.
Woodward had an old flowerpot with a red flag on a stick and he placed
it at the front of his balcony. If he wanted to see "Deep Throat," he
would move the flowerpot and the stick with the red flag to the rear of
the balcony. If the pot had been moved, Woodward and "Deep Throat" would
meet at 2 a.m., when downtown Washington was quiet and a little eerie,
in an underground garage.

In those rare instances
when "Deep Throat" wanted to initiate a meeting with Woodward, he would
somehow circle page 20 in the copy of the New York Times that was delivered
to Woodward's door before 7 a.m. In the lower corner of the page there
would be a hand-drawn clock, the hands pointing to the hour when "Deep
Throat" wanted to meet Woodward in the garage. Woodward says he still
has no idea how "Deep Throat" got hold of the newspaper to make those
markings.

Sussman suggests that
"Deep Throat" made for good drama but not really that important as a source.
The problem was, he often spoke in riddles, like the oracles at Delphi.
No, he would say, you can go higher to incriminate people at a still more
important level of responsibility in the campaign. Yes, you should look
harder at who had access to the money.

On September 15,
the five Watergate burglars, plus Hunt and Liddy, were indicted by a federal
grand jury. Attorney General Richard Kleindienst said the indictments
represented the culmination of "one of the most intensive, objective,
and thorough investigations in many years, reaching out to cities all
across the United States as well as into foreign countries."

At the Post, Woodward
and Bernstein wrote in their book, there was the gnawing suspicion that
this was as far as the Federal prosecutors intended to take the case.
After all, they noted, the Mexican checks, the $25,000 Dahlberg check,
and the slush fund stashed away in Stans's safe weren't even mentioned
in the indictments.

So, mostly out on
a limb all alone by now, they pushed on.

The very next day,
September 16, they reported that funds used in the Watergate bugging and
break-in had been "controlled by several assistants of John N. Mitchell"
when he was the campaign boss. Then, on September 29, they delivered a
stunner:

John N. Mitchell,
while serving as U.S. Attorney General, personally controlled
a secret Republican fund that was used to gather information about
the Democrats, according to sources involved in the Watergate
investigation.

Four other persons,
they reported, eventually were given authorization to approve payments
from the secret fund. They identified two of them as former Secretary
of Commerce Stans, the campaign's finance chairman, and Jeb Magruder,
the deputy director of the campaign. The other two were unnamed.

In putting the story
together, Bernstein called Mitchell at his apartment in New York City
at about 11 p.m. and read him the lead. "Jesus," Mitchell told Bernstein.
"All that crap, you're putting it in the paper? It's been denied. Jesus.
Katie Graham [the Post's publisher] is gonna get her tit caught in a big
fat wringer if that's published. Good Christ. That's the most sickening
thing I've ever heard." In the story, the quote was cleaned up to eliminate
any mention of the publisher's anatomy. (It didn't bother Mrs. Graham
a whole lot. A dentist in California made a little wringer with a working
crank out of gold he normally used for fillings and sent it to Mrs. Graham.
Later, her friend, the humor columnist Art Buchwald, gave her a tiny gold
breast to go with it. "I occasionally wore them on a chain around my neck,"
Mrs. Graham later wrote in her autobiography.)

One result of what
Woodward calls "incremental reportingtaking one step at a time,
day after day, big stories and small onesis that potential sources
become acquainted with your work and know who to call when they think
they have something worthwhile to offer. Other papers did good work on
Watergatethe Los Angeles Times, the Washington Star-News, the New
York Timesbut only the Post did the kind of incremental reporting
that made people aware that it was the paper with the biggest stake in
the story.

Thus, the night of
September 28, Bernstein received a phone call from a government lawyer
with an interesting story. The caller said he had a friend named Alex
Shipley who had been approached "to go to work for the Nixon campaign
in a very unusual way." How unusual? Bernstein asked. Well, the caller
said, his friend had been asked to join the Nixon team in the summer of
1971 to work with "a crew of people whose job it would be to disrupt the
Democratic campaign during the primaries. This guy told Shipley there
would be virtually unlimited money available."

Woodward and Bernstein
had believed all along that the bugging and break-in at the Watergate
hadn't been an isolated event; it must have been, they thought, a part
of a larger campaign of sabotage and obstruction. Bernstein ran down Shipley,
a Democrat and an assistant attorney general in Tennessee, who said the
man who tried to hire him to do dirty tricks was Donald H. Segretti, a
31-year-old lawyer in Marina del Ray, California.

Bernstein and Woodward
broke this blockbuster on the front page on October 10.

FBI agents have
established that the Watergate bugging incident stemmed from a massive
campaign of political spying and sabotage conducted on behalf of
President Nixon's re-election and directed by officials of the White
House and the Committee for the Re-election of the President.

The activities,
according to information in FBI and Department of Justice files,
were aimed at all the major Democratic presidential contenders andsince
1971represented a basic strategy of the Nixon re-election
effort.

Woodward and Bernstein
hadn't actually got anything from Segretti, who refused to talk to them,
but from three different people he tried to recruit for his little dirty-tricks
operation, they had learned the broad outlines of what he was trying to
accomplish.

They also had stumbled
on to what the two reporters said was the best example they had seen so
far of this kind of sabotage carried out by the Nixon re-election committee.
It involved a letter to the editor published in the Manchester, N.H.,
Union Leader on February 24 alleging that Sen. Edmund S. Muskie of Maine,
at that time the leading contender for the Democratic presidential nomination,
had condoned the use of the derogatory word, "Canucks," to describe Americans
with French-Canadian roots, who vote in large numbers in New Hampshireelections.The letter, signed by a fictional Paul Morrison
of Deerfield Beach, Fla., deeply disturbed the thin-skinned Muskie and
he was said to have ended up in tears talking about his troubles in a
campaign speech in Manchester. It marked the beginning of the end for
his campaign. Muskie's withdrawal was a coup for the Nixon strategists;
they had believed from the start he would be their most challenging opponent.

In their October 10
story, Bernstein and Woodward said that Ken Clawson, the White House press
officer who had once been a reporter at the Post, had told Post reporter
Marilyn Berger that he was the author of the Canuck letter. Maybe he was,
maybe he wasn'tWoodward says he still isn't surebut the damage
was done.

Two days later, Bernstein
wrote a story detailing more dirty tricks played on Muskie and his campaign.
They included stolen documents, faked literature, canceled rallies and
mysterious telephone calls. The whole business seemed bizarre, but Deep
Throat put it all in perspective. "These are not very bright guys," he
told Woodward.

Both the Post and
Time magazine, whose Washington bureau had good sources at the Justice
Department, reported on Sunday and Monday, October 15 and 16, that Segretti
had been hired for the dirty-tricks job by Dwight Chapin, Nixon's appointments
secretary. At Sussman's request, Bernstein and Woodward noted that Chapin
met the President on a daily basis and "is one of a handful of White House
staff members with easy access to the President." In their story on the
16th, Bernstein and Woodward reported that Segretti had been paid to do
his dirty tricks by Herbert Kalmbach, Nixon's lawyer.

Incrementally, one
step at a time, the reporting was taking the Post closer and closer to
the Oval Office itself.

This was getting
serious, and at this point Sussman began to think he was being pushed
aside by Rosenfeld and other top editors at the Post. "I began to feel
somewhat sorry for myself" on October 16," Sussman wrote in his book,
"and for the first time in a long while, I left the office in the midst
of a Watergate story."

The next morning,
Rosenfeld complained that Woodward and Bernstein had been difficult to
work with the night before. Woodward and Bernstein complained that Rosenfeld
had been a problem. That afternoon, they all met in managing editor Simons'
office. Simons told them the Post was putting together a Watergate task
force, with Sussman still in charge. But Sussman realized things would
never be quite the same. The bureaucracy was moving in on the story.

The Hugh Sloan Story

Sussman arrived for
work in the newsroom about 9:30 a.m. on October 24, and found Woodward
already talking to a source on his telephone. He gave Sussman the thumbs
up signal, covered the phone, and said, "We've got Haldeman." H.R. "Bob"
Haldeman and his sidekick, John Ehrlichman, were Nixon's two top aides
and advisors. They were a team that ran the White House. Haldeman, Nixons
chief of staff, would be the biggest catch of all.

Sources were telling
the two reporters that Chapin would never have hired or paid Segretti
without the approval of his boss, Haldeman. Their most important source
was Hugh Sloan, the former CREEP treasurer who had resigned weeks earlier,
apparently because he hadn't approved of what was going on at the re-election
committee. They talked to him time and time again, and they became convinced
that he had hinted to them that Haldeman was one of the handful of Nixon
operatives with access to the famous slush fund in Stans's safe. They
also understood that Sloan had told them he had testified to that effect
before the grand jury. Other sources seemed to confirm the story.

At about 6 p.m.,
the two reporters, along with Sussman, Rosenfeld, and Simons, met in Bradlee's
office. "Bradlee began asking questions the way a prosecutor would," Sussman
remembered. This was a new departure; story sessions on Watergate had
never been like this before. For the first time, too, lawyers were called
in to read the copy.

In the end, Bradlee
said, "OK, go." The story appeared on the Post's front page the morning
of October 25 saying that Sloan had testified before the grand jury that
Bob Haldeman was one of the men who had access to the secret campaign
fund.

The story was wrong.

Throughout Watergate,
Nixon Administration officials had become notorious for criticizing stories
by attacking them without actually denying them. These official statements
sounded like denials, but when they were carefully parsed, they did not
actually contradict the allegations in the stories. Reporters even coined
a term for these statements. They called them "non-denial denials."
At times, when the Administration was shown to have done what it had seemingly
denied doing, officials would quietly back away from those earlier statements.
At one point, White House press secretary Ron Ziegler even said that one
former non-denial denial was "no longer operative."

When the Hugh Sloan
story hit, Woodward, Bernstein and others at the Post knew there were
problems because the Administrations denials were the real thing.

"I watched the shit
hit the fan on the CBS Morning News," Bradlee recalled in his book. "To
my eternal horror, there was correspondent Dan Schorr with a microphone
jammed in the face of Hugh Sloan and his lawyer. And the lawyer was categorical
in his denial: Sloan had not testified to the grand jury that Haldeman
controlled the secret fund."

Even now, Bradlee
shudders at the thought. "It was terrible," he recalls. "So many people
had been waiting for us to get it wrong, and here we did it. When you
pick yourself off first base, and that's what we did, you can't pretend
it didn't happen."

Sussman says the
story was wrong on three points"Sloan hadn't told the grand jury
about Haldeman, Haldeman hadn't been interviewed by the FBI as we said
he had, and we had his age wrong. He was 46, not 47."

In the past, the White
House had been forced to waffle on most of its explanations about the
Post's stories. This time, Nixon's spokesmen jumped all over the Post
with both feet. No, said Ron Ziegler at his regular morning press conference,
the story wasnt true. "I personally feel," he said, "that
this is shabby journalism by The Washington Post . It is a blatant
effort at character assassination that I do not think has been witnessed
in the political process in come time."

As it turned out,
Bernstein and Woodward had the main point rightHaldeman was
deeply involved with the slush fund. But they had the details wrong. For
this, they paid a heavy price.

How did these two
young reporters, so far ahead of everyone else on this story no one could
see their dust, get the October 25 story so wrong?

There were cautionary
yellow lights all along the way. One of the sources, for example, an unidentified
FBI agent, was asked by Bernstein, "Are you sure it's Haldeman?" in a
phone call with Woodward listening in on another line, according to Sussman's
book. "Yeah," he replied, "John Haldeman." After they hung up, the two
reporters looked at each other. "John Haldeman?" Haldeman's first name,
of course, was Bob. So Bernstein called the source back. "You said John
Haldeman, but his name is Bob." Not to worry, the agent said, it's Haldeman.
"I can never remember first names."

There were more problems.
Woodward and Bernstein had spent hours with Sloan, who was still reluctant
to tattle on his old colleagues. He was "elliptical" in what he told the
two reporters, Sussman said in his book. It was hardly a surprise, then,
that the two reporters had problems writing the story. That in itself
is a cautionary light. Good, clean stories tend to write themselves. Stories
with problems don't flow easily.

The two reporters
knew who their sources wereeven though what they had said came up
shortand they had more problems in figuring out how to handle the
story's attribution. They were faced with finding a way to make the story
sound authoritative without exposing their reluctant or maybe confused
sources.

Howard Simons, the
managing editor, was uneasy, and suggested, according to Sussman, that
Woodward and Bernstein try to come up with another source. According to
Sussman, Bernstein piped up that he knew a source in the Justice Department
who might be willing to confirm such an important story. But the source
was skittish, and in the end Bernstein suggested a novel arrangement in
which the source would say nothing if the story was right and hang up
if it was wrong. The source agreed and used the signal that Bernstein
understood meant that the story about Haldeman's involvement was correct.

In his book, Sussman
told what happened next:

"That's madness,
Carl," I said. "Don't ever do anything like that. Bernstein and Woodward
knew a lot more about the details of what they were reporting than I did.
But here was Bernstein saying that he was able to confirm a story damaging
to the President of the United States and his chief of staff through the
silence of a balky source. Maybe that could work in the movies, but not
in The Washington Post."

The story ran on schedule
in the Post. A year later, Sussman bumped into the balky Justice Department
source. He told Sussman that "Carl got his own signals mixed up. I didn't
give him the 'confirm' signal, I gave him the 'deny.'"

Bernstein's arrangement
with his source was too clever by half. Sussman was right to be outraged.
Yet, no one blew the whistle on the story. Everyone wanted the story to
be right. Everyone wanted to nail Nixon's chief of staff.

Publicly, the Post's
initial reaction was a statement from Bradlee that the Post stood behind
its story. Internally, however, the editors and reporters knew better.
They did argue that the story was "basically true" because Haldeman
was really involved, even though Sloan hadn't explicitly said so in his
appearance before the grand jury. Yet, they admitted to themselves, and
later publicly, and even to this day, that they blew the story. They knew
that if the details were wrong, the story was inaccurate. And they vowed
to examine where they had gone wrong and do better in the future. None
of the principals involved in the story defends those mistakes as mere
details.

Two weeks later, onNovember 7, Nixon was re-elected president, defeating George McGovern
by 18 million votes (60.7% to 37.5%).

For the White House,
it was retribution time. No more news for the Post; the White House dumped
it all in the laps of the Star-News. Even Dorothy McCardle, the nice 68-year-old
lady who covered social events at the White House for the Post, was cut
off. The Post thought it was curious, too, that two of its TV stations
in Florida suddenly had their licenses challenged.

Worst of all, though,
the Post fell into what Bradlee called a "black hole." "We couldn't get
a smell of a story," he wrote.

Desperate to make
some news, Bernstein and Woodward tried to get in touch with the grand
jurors handling the Watergate investigation in late November. They came
very close to being thrown in jail for their efforts. "I am sure we were
all influenced by Nixon's overwhelming re-election win, on top of our
own inability to break new ground in the Watergate story," Bradlee wrote.
He went on to defend the exercise, but without very much enthusiasm. Bernstein
and Woodward, in their book, conceded it was "a seedy venture" and said
they wished they had never thought of it.

Early in December,
Post reporter Lawrence Meyer discovered that a White House phone used
by Howard Hunt had been installed in a woman's home in Alexandria. The
telephone company said it had never seen anything quite like it. It wasn't
much of a story but it put the Post back in the game. "We won a $2 bet,"
Woodward says.

But, for all the Post's
gloom, the cavalry was on the way.

"What you have to
remember," says Woodward, "is that while maybe everyone wasn't reading
about Watergate, we had two subscribers who were reading every word."
One of them was John Sirica, the chief judge of the United States District
Court for the District of Columbia, a very tough judge known, not always
affectionately, as "Maximum John." The other was Democratic Senator Sam
Ervin from North Carolina, a very smart country lawyer.

The Trial

The trial of the five
Watergate burglars and Liddy and McCord began in Judge Sirica's courtroom
on Monday, January 8, 1973. This marks the end of the Post's lone-ranger
coverage of the Watergate story. Now, with an actual trial under way,
with real people doing real things, reporters from other newspapers and
magazines and from radio and TV could finally get their teeth into the
story.

Bradlee wrote he was
actually pleased to be beaten on an important story by his old friend,
Seymour M. "Sy" Hersh and the New York Times, "because it meant the Post
was no longer alone in alleging obstruction of justice by the administration."
Hersh had reported that the Watergate defendants were being paid hush
money with funds that appeared to have been raised for the Nixon re-election
campaign. Bradlee said one story like that was fine, "as long as we didn't
get beaten again."

Sirica wasn't
pleased with the way the trial was progressing. He had read all those
Post stories, and he was convinced there was a lot more at stake than
a bugging and burglary at Democratic Party headquarters. He got the break
he needed when McCord wrote him a letter saying pressure had been applied
to keep the defendants quiet and that perjury had been committed.

More damaging information
came from the hearings to confirm L. Patrick Gray's appointment as FBI
director. On February 5, Senator Ervin introduced a resolution calling
for an allocation of $500,000 to fund the operation of a Special Senate
Committee to investigate Watergate. The resolution passed 77 to 0. Woodward
interpreted that to mean that possibly Nixon's support on Capitol Hill
was beginning to erode.

On April 30,
Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Attorney General Kleindienst resigned, and John
Dean was fired. James McCartney, the respected national correspondent
for Knight Newspapers, was in Bradlee's office when the news came in,
interviewing the editor for a long freelance piece in the Columbia Journalism
Review. McCartney wrote:

Howard Simons,
the Post's managing editor, slipped into the room. "Nixon has accepted
the resignations of Ehrlichman and Haldeman and Dean," he said.
"Kleindienst is out and [Elliot] Richardson is the new attorney
general."

For
a split second, Ben Bradlee's mouth dropped open with an expression
of sheer delight. Then he put one cheek on the desk, eyes closed,
and banged the desk repeatedly with his right fist. "How do you
like them apples?" he said to the grinning Simons. "Not a bad start."
Then, addressing the visitor: "The White Hats Win."

Still, it wasn't
over. Everything around him was collapsing, but Nixon was still standing.
It needed something more. By May 17, when the Watergate committee began
its televised hearings, there was only one name left in their files that
Bernstein and Woodward had never thoroughly checked outpresidential
aide Alexander P. Butterfield. Sloan had once told them that Butterfield
was involved in "internal security." "Deep Throat" had said he might be
interesting. Woodward passed the word to investigators for Ervin's Watergate
committee. Maybe, he said, it would be a good idea to interview Butterfield.
Sam Dash, the committee counsel, set up the interview for Friday, July
13, 1973, surely the unluckiest day of all for Richard Nixon.

The next morning,
Woodward received a phone call from a senior investigator. "We interviewed
Butterfield," he said. "He told the whole story."

What whole story?
Woodward asked.

"Nixon bugged himself,"
the investigator replied.

Woodward called Bradlee
at home Saturday night and told him what he had learned. Bradlee, half-asleep,
didn't seem very interested.

"How would you rate
the story?" Woodward asked.

"B-plus," Bradlee
replied.

On Monday, before
a national television audience, Butterfield laid out the whole story about
how the President of the United States had recorded all those terribly
incriminating conversations in his own office.

"OK," Bradlee said
the next day, "it's more than a B-plus."

Woodward says it
was the only time during the whole pursuit of the story that Bradlee was
wrong.

Events now moved
slowly but inexorably.

On July 23, Nixon
refused to turn over the tape recordings to the Senate committee. On October
20, in what became known as the "Saturday Night Massacre", he
fired Archibald Cox as the Watergate special prosecutor and abolished
his office. Attorney General Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William
D. Ruckelshaus resigned in protest.

It wasn't until July
24, 1974, that the Supreme Court ruled, unanimously, that Nixon had to
turn over the tapes, in which investigators finally found the "smoking
gun." Three days later, the House Judiciary Committee passed the first
of three impeachment articles, obstruction of justice.